When to use Scorm

Many trainers and educators come up with ambitious ideas to facilitate the learning process. But from ideas to reality, we need to build bridges or, in other words, systems, databases and connectors.

When discussing the technical solutions to make a concept happen, the well-known standard Scorm often comes around at some point. Scorm is a technology which helps to deliver e-learning courses to learners, often using learning management platforms.

Use Scorm when selling courses to large organizations

Large organizations like companies, universities or schools have several years of experience with e-learning. Most organizations have been delivering courses themselves for a long time, most likely using their own learning management system (LMS).

They also have been buying courses from content providers to speed up the availability of new content or obtain expertise they do not have in-house. Content providers, such as e-learning agencies or training organizations, create and sell courses to those organizations. To do so, content providers need to use the Scorm standard because their clients already have a LMS compatible with Scorm. A Scorm package, containing the course, can be imported to any learning platform.

In most cases, clients of e-learning agencies and training organizations will require courses to be transferred to them in a form of Scorm packages.

Use Scorm when building partnerships

A content provider might want to build partnerships with other content providers or organizations. The most popular way to exchange courses is historically the Scorm standard.

It is worth noting that there are various ways to deliver light Scorm packages which do not contain the content itself. It might help to build partnerships without giving away the total control on courses.

Avoid Scorm when directly delivering courses

Delivering courses directly means to have your own learning management system (LMS) and enroll learners to various courses hosted in it. Because launching Scorm packages might decrease the user experience (popup, no offline support, low UX on mobile), it might be wiser to build content directly in the platform. The user experience should be the best the LMS can offer, specially in the mobile app. However, moving the courses to another place will be a difficult task.

Avoid Scorm when building a new product

Scorm has been around for 20 years and while it is still a popular standard, more recent technologies are available such as xAPI or cmi5. Beside, most of the time you do not need a standard at all, specially if you are not required to be compatible with other systems.

If you are a startup building a new product, your primarily focus should be on creating an amazing product. Of course you can keep the door opened with API (or xAPI) but that could easily come later as well.

To sum up

To Scorm, or not to Scorm? That is the question. And of course it depends. But to keep it short, be ready for Scorm if your client ask for it. Otherwise, there might be other solutions.

Have you been using Scorm recently? Feel free to leave a comment.